Saturday, June 10, 2017

Will Facebook watch and record users through their webcams and smartphone cameras? See published US patent application 20150242679.

A post at the Independent titled "Facebook could secretly watch users through webcams" includes text:

Facebook is considering secretly watching and recording users through their webcams and smartphone cameras, a newly discovered patent suggests.

The "background" section of published US patent application 20150242679 (to Facebook) states:

Computing devices such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablets increasingly include at least one, and often more than one, imaging component, such as a digital camera. Some devices may include a front-facing camera that is positioned on the same side of the device as a display. Thus, during normal operation, a user may be looking towards the imaging component. However, current content delivery systems typically do not utilize passive imaging information. Thus, a need exists for a content delivery solution that takes advantage of available passive imaging data to provide content to a user with improved relevancy.

The first claim of published US patent application 20150242679 (to Facebook) states

A computer-implemented method, comprising:

identifying at least one emotion type associated with at least one detected emotion characteristic by an emotion detection component;
storing the identified emotion type in a storage component; receiving a request from one or more applications for emotion type by an application programming interface (API) component; in response to the request, returning the identified emotion type by the API component; and identifying content for display by the one or more applications based upon the identified emotion type.

A search on PAIR gave: Sorry, the entered Publication Number "20150242679" is not available.
The number may have been incorrectly typed, or assigned to an application
that is not yet available for public inspection.

It should come as no surprise that Facebook FB -3.28% wants to become a literal version of itself at some point. That is to say, that your face would eventually make it into the social network in order to serve you content based on anything from your emotional state to expression. According to a few new patents uncovered by CBI Insights (though, never out of the public eye if you know where to look) this is exactly what Facebook wants to do. Pull your face into its messenger system, Face / Off style. Well, maybe not that brutally.

The patents, applied for back in November of 2015 and granted last month are among hundreds (probably thousands) of patents that Facebook holds. The social network files patents on a pretty much constant basis, most of them are technical based and used to keep proprietary tech safe. That makes sense and is general practice for most tech companies. In between all the technical patents like Systems and methods for adding users to a networked computer system there are three that want to use your phone camera to take a good, hard look at your face.

Separately, Naveh, an inventor on 20150242679 , is the first named inventor on issued US Patent 9,225,788, titled Method and apparatus for identifying common interest between social network users with first claim

A method comprising: identifying, by a social networking system, a first content object with which a first user of the social networking system has interacted; identifying, by the social networking system, a second content object with which a second user of the social networking system has interacted; associating, by the social networking system, a first keyword phrase with the first user, wherein the first keyword phrase is associated with the first content object by conducting a reverse keyword search on the first content object, wherein the reverse keyword search includes searching a social network search pattern database containing information of social network relationships between content objects of the social network system and keyword phrases, and wherein the reverse keyword search receives the first content object or an identifier of the first content object as an input, and generates a keyword phrase that is related to the first content object as an output, and wherein the social network search pattern database is updated by results of a new reverse keyword search; associating, by the social networking system, a second keyword phrase with the second user, wherein the second keyword phrase is associated with the second content object by conducting a reverse keyword search of the second content object; and determining, by the social networking system, a common interest for the first user and the second user of the social networking system toward a topic by identifying a match between the first keyword phrase associated with the first user with the second keyword phrase associated with the second user.

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About Me

I'm a patent lawyer located in central New Jersey. I have a J.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, where I studied graphite intercalation compounds at the Center for Materials Research. I worked at Exxon Corporate Research in areas ranging from engine deposits through coal and petroleum to fullerenes. An article that I wrote in The Trademark Reporter, 1994, 84, 379-407 on color trademarks was cited by Supreme Court in Qualitex v. Jacobson, 514 US 159 (1995) and the methodology was adopted
in the Capri case in N.D. Ill. An article that I wrote on DNA profiling was cited by the Colorado Supreme Court (Shreck case) and a Florida appellate court (Brim case). I was interviewed by NHK-TV about the Jan-Hendrik Schon affair. I am developing ipABC, an entity that combines rigorous IP analytics with study of business models, to optimize utilization of intellectual property. I can be reached at C8AsF5 at yahoo.com.